The Sorrows of Satan: or, The Strange Experience of One Geoffrey Tempest, Millionaire: A Romance — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
The Sorrows of Satan: or, The Strange Experience of One Geoffrey Tempest, Millionaire: A Romance
John Stuart Mill · en
That is really what is meant by
being 'presented' and 'coming out,'--these are the fancy terms of
one's parental auctioneer. My life was now passed in dressing,
having my photograph taken, giving 'sittings' to aspiring
fashionable painters, and being 'inspected' by men with a view to
matrimony. It was distinctly understood in society that I was not to
be sold under a certain figure per annum,--and the price was too
high for most would-be purchasers. How sick I grew of my constant
exhibition in the marriage-market! What contempt and hatred was
fostered in me for the mean and pitiable hypocrisies of my set! I
was not long in discovering that money was the chief-motive power of
all social success,--that the proudest and highest personages in
the world could be easily gathered together under the roof of any
vulgar plebeian who happened to have enough cash to feed and
entertain them. As an example of this, I remember a woman, ugly,
passée and squint-eyed, who during her father's life was only
allowed about half-a-crown a week as pocket-money up to her fortieth
year,--and who, when that father died, leaving her in possession of
half his fortune, (the other half going to illegitimate children of
whom she had never heard, he having always posed as a pattern of
immaculate virtue) suddenly blossomed out as a 'leader' of fashion,
and succeeded, through cautious scheming and ungrudging toadyism, in
assembling some of the highest people in the land under her roof.
Ugly and passée though she was, and verging towards fifty, with
neither grace, wit, nor intelligence, through the power of her cash
alone she invited Royal dukes and 'titles' generally to her dinners
and dances,--and it is to their shame that they actually accepted
her invitations. Such voluntary degradations on the part of really
well-connected people I have never been able to understand,--it is
not as if they were actually in want of food or amusement, for they
have a surfeit of both every season,--and it seems to me that they
ought to show a better example than to flock in crowds to the
entertainments of a mere uninteresting and ugly nobody just because
she happens to have money. I never entered her house myself though
she had the audacity to invite me,--I learned moreover, that she had
promised a friend of mine a hundred guineas if she could persuade me
to make one appearance in her rooms. For my renown as a 'beauty'
combined with my pride and exclusiveness, would have given her
parties a _prestige_ greater than even Royalty could bestow,--_she_
knew that and _I_ knew that,--and knowing it, never condescended to
so much as notice her by a bow. But though I took a certain
satisfaction in thus revenging myself on the atrocious vulgarity of
_parvenus_ and social interlopers, I grew intensely weary of the